Happy Birthday Month to our OWH family! Today we start a month-long party that many volunteers have given countless hours to preparing for you. Stay tuned to this blog daily (subscribe by email - see the sidebar where you can add your email address, and have inspiration delivered right to you!). There will be challenges hosted either here or on blogs around the internet every single day of September - some really exciting things are in store, many with great stamping goodies for prizes! We can't wait to join you in playing along! Note that prizes on the Stars and Stamps blog will be awarded in early October - all our challenges end on Sept 30, based on cards submitted via InLinkz below. OTHER blogs have their own deadlines to follow.

Today is the start of the DRS Designs Card Drive...check out what they're doing by clicking here:

Midweek Throwdown challenge
First we’d like to thank everyone who entered into last weeks challenge. It’s so fun visiting your blogs and meeting all of our amazingly talented paper crafters, a big thank you to everyone who played along!

Our challenge this week is Halloween! We challenge you to make Halloween cards for our heroes to send home to their loved ones!

A special request this Halloween card making season:
We encourage you to stay away from "death" and "skulls and crossbones" for your Halloween cards. Happy little ghosties and skeletons are fine, and there are even some silly skulls (add some wiggly eyes and you can cheer up just about anything!)...... but some of the stamps and papers out there can be pretty gloomy....and while our heroes may love all the spooky side of the holiday, and their families as well, we would still like to stay on the 'happy' side of Halloween. Why? Well, if something unfortunately happened to one of our heroes, and a gloomy card was the final communication between them and their family—you get the idea? We want to help that be a positive memory for all concerned! Thanks for your help!

Go make a 'happy' Halloween card to share! And remember, Sept 20 is the deadline for OWH Halloween cards!

Our wonderfully fun samples this week were made by Nancy! To see more of Nancy’s fabulous cards please visit her blog Scrap Happens. Thank you Nancy for your fun inspiration!

Prize
The prize you can win by having your name randomly drawn from all submissions: these stamps donated by cardmaker Marcy K! Can you imagine filling that little bag stamp with those candies? It won't be in time for Halloween cards for OWH, but fill it with red striped peppermint candy stamps and it'll work perfectly for Christmas! Upload your card by Sept 30th to qualify for the drawing for this prize, and we'll draw a winner in early October!

To play along in this week's challenge, simply upload a project using this week's challenge to your blog or online gallery then leave a direct link to your project using the Inlinkz widget at the bottom of this post. And remember, you may use this challenge at any time. Feel free to re-post the challenge on your blog along with your card… then come back and leave a link for us so we may all see your cards!

We encourage everyone to take a few moments to visit and leave comments for the other participants. Comments are a wonderful way to say thank you for sharing your creative project and inspires everyone to create.

Thanks for stopping by and hope you join in the fun!

To play along this week, please enter your name, URL and email address in the link below then press next step and select the photo of your creative project. An icon will appear on the blog featuring the photo you selected. If the photo doesn’t appear right away, don’t worry, it will after the page has been refreshed.

This challenge was so much fun...first time I actually got my project up in time. Yes, the "Let me be Frank" card is a hoot...maybe we should make a "Walk this way?" card (you know, from Mel Brooks's "Young Frankenstein")!